The eminent equestrian painter Sir Alfred Munnings chose a spring evening in 1949 to give vent to his long bottled-up contempt for “so-called modern art”. The occasion was the annual banquet of the Royal Academy of Arts, when as outgoing President Munnings was due to make his retirement speech. On his right sat the Right Honourable Winston Churchill, a dabbler in oils who had recently been appointed Honorary Academician Extraordinary, and who on artistic matters was very much a man after Munnings’ own heart. Emboldened by such august company and by rather too much to drink, Munnings began his diatribe.

 

He denounced the perverted new styles of art fashionable in Paris: half-baked paintings of people with eyes where their noses ought to be, and the like. If taste for the work of foreign johnnies like Picasso and Matisse continued unchecked, it would mean the death of serious art. “If you paint a tree,” Munnings thundered, “for God’s sake make it look like a tree! If you paint a sky, for God’s sake make it look like a sky!” He gestured to Winston Churchill for support: “I know he is with me because once he said to me, ‘Alfred, if you met that Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his something something something?’ I said, ‘Yes sir! Yes! I would!’”

 

Munnings’s speech established him as the country’s principal spokesman of reactionary taste: a blimpish but undeniably entertaining character, much in demand as an after-dinner speaker. 2001 is officially British Art Year – marking the centenary of Henry Tate’s establishment of a national British art collection – so perhaps it is appropriate that it should begin with Sotheby’s large retrospective exhibition of Munnings’s work. He was after all the most rabidly British artist...

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